15 comments:

"This is mostly due to land surface-vegetation-atmosphere feedbacks taken into account in the present study which were not considered by PM05." Hrm? Well, I suppose I'll have to read it now.

Why do I have the sneaking suspicion that those Dutch guys strong-armed RP Sr. in some manner, e.g. by promising to be as nice as possible if signed on? I suppose I'm a suspicious sort.

Well, being so, I can't help but also think of the time Christy and Spencer were made to toe the line in that early CCSP report, and then repudiated it a matter of weeks later (using the excuse that their yet newest data set changed everything). We'll see if this one sticks better.

I remember asking RP Sr., when he first raised this business years ago, that he should apply for funding to do a field test of his idea. It seemed like the apparatus would be pretty cheap. I wonder if he even tried. In any case I'm pretty sure his idea even then was just to keep the ball in the air for as long as possible.

The full paper is here: http://www.met.wau.nl/medewerkers/steeneveld/Steeneveld_etal2010_JGR_SBL_T2m_rise.pdf

From the conclusion:In this paper we revisit the issue of land surface temperature trends and their dependence on wind speeds. In an earlier study, Pielke and Matsui [2005] concluded that the nighttime 2 m temperature increase due to changes in longwave flux divergence should strongly depend on wind speed. Here we conclude that the model used in that study is not sufficient for such an analysis because of the limited processes represented as well as not considering the land surface‐vegetation‐atmosphere feedback

The answer to the question of whether long term temperature trends near the surface are a significant function of height is an important climate metric issue, as these trends are used in the construction of the annual average global surface temperature trend. From this new study, it appears that feedbacks mute temperature trends near the surface, however, this was for a specific situation and may not be general to other landscapes. The new McNider et al paper, that is in preparation, will examine this issue for other situations, and we will report on this weblog when this study is complete.

Eli will claim victory It was pretty clear K&P was going to fail near the ground-------------------Drive the wind speed to zero and you end up with a zero thickness scale length, an infinite temperature difference between ground and the layer a micron up. In other words, at some point this little model fails. It probably is not too bad for the upper range of the wind scale used, but, of course, in that case the scale length will also be larger, e.g. the layer thicker and the lapse rate not as extreme.

Hmm, OK, if there's such a thing as a boundary layer specialist, those guys fill the bill. S. is a brand-new ass't prof. and got his PhD at Wageningen under H. I'd still like to know the back story, but I suppose it may be nothing more complicated than an inability on RP Sr.'s part to refuse an offer of a co-authorship. Even at that, one can only imagine that one or both of them must have the patience of Job, recalling e.g. the infamous butterfly effect dispute.